'America vs the West' by Kori Schake: an edited extract

By Kori Schake

29 Nov 2018 — 8:15 AM

Even champions of liberal internationalism acknowledge that "the liberal international order led by the United States since World War II is fraying; unsustainable by inertia alone, its only hope of success is shrewd American statecraft". Given the portents emanating from American domestic politics, that would seem long odds on which to base the stability of the global system.

If current indications are correct and America's ability to lead is corroding, the question of whether a power transition will occur peacefully is hugely consequential. Historically, hegemonic transitions have been the product of war; in fact, history records only one instance of a peaceful hegemonic transition. That one instance was between Great Britain and the United States in the late 19th century. It was the result of convergence between the identities of the two countries. The democratic United States, because of westward expansion, had come to think of itself in imperial terms, and imperial Britain redefined itself in celebration of the peaceful expansion of political franchise – it became a country that revelled in achieving greater political inclusion without revolution.

That peaceful transition was completely anomalous in history, and highly contingent even with so many similarities between the rising and the established power. Mostly, states fight to maintain their dominance, or to transgress another's. What, then, might the alternatives be to a US-led liberal order? Without a reliable America, how can its enervated allies forestall transition to an order imposed by an authoritarian China?

US President Donald Trump, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron. The irascible America represented by Trump poses a thorny dilemma for US allies. FRANCOIS MORI

The irascible America represented by President Trump poses a thorny dilemma for US allies. The unexpected danger of a hegemon apparently intent on destroying the order it created leaves them with two basic options: finding ways of working constructively with the United States, even with Donald Trump at its helm, or containing and working around American intransigence.

Constructive engagement

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Several allies are experimenting with ways to cajole America's President. President Macron of France, Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom, and Prime Minister Abe of Japan have attempted to cultivate personal relationships with President Trump and his family in the hopes it will translate into policy compromise. At the respectable end of the spectrum, President Macron invited President Trump to the Bastille Day parade to revel in the glorious spectacle of France. It unquestionably sparked admiration and perhaps envy, and resulted in Macron garnering the first state visit of the Trump presidency, but it was insufficient to prevent President Trump withdrawing the United States from the Iranian nuclear agreement. Nor was Prime Minister Abe's golf, or Prime Minister May's hand holding (or rising challenger Chinese President Xi Jinping's cinematic Forbidden City tour) enough to have any significant effect on the US president's policy decisions.

The failure has rippled through different political cultures in various ways. President Trump went to the United Kingdom in July 2018 but Britain still hesitates to extend a formal state visit invitation to the President knowing how spectacularly creative and vociferous British civil society will be in pillorying him, further complicating a difficult governmental relationship. France accords its President more ceremonial latitude; Macron seems to have paid no political price. Association with Trump has further dragged down the popularity of the Abe government, enmeshed as it is in scandal and unable to achieve economic lift-off irrespective of the number of "arrows" it fires.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has succeeded in getting policy outcomes with a sharper-edged version of cultivating personal relations to achieve policy goals, indulging President Trump's worst excesses in return for triumphal deliverables that advance Israel's zero-sum interests; moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem and withdrawing from the Iran nuclear agreement are examples. Bare-knuckled in the short term and possibly pyrrhic in the long term (especially if it collapses bipartisan support for Israel in US domestic politics), this approach has nonetheless produced the most concrete results. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia also appear to be practising a variant of this model, in which the President and his family are treated like Middle Eastern potentates, with no differentiation between the family and the business of government.

Under the radar

Quiet, practical co-operation is another model, currently exemplified by Sweden and Finland. Both countries have entered into new defence agreements with the US Department of Defence without any apparent White House involvement. In the description of a Scandinavian architect of the policy, "unglamorous technical co-operation brings practical benefits".

This model would ignore the President entirely and hope that spinning thick webbing between professionals in government departments will condition American reflexes to sustain commitments the President might baulk at. It banks on common values and the routines of common interest to cement patterns of co-operation that "create facts on the ground". Just as NATO's Partnership for Peace made future allies participants in alliance activities to soften the boundary between allies and those outside the friendly confines of membership, this kind of co-operation signals increased willingness to run risks together.

Without a reliable America, how can its enervated allies forestall transition to an order imposed by an authoritarian China? David Rowe

However, it can be overturned by presidential fiat, as President Trump did at the 2018 NATO Summit. Allied governments produced an impressive package of policy initiatives designed to defang President Trump's earlier criticism: increases in defence spending, the re-establishment of the Second Fleet to protect the Atlantic approaches to the United States, and the commitment to produce 30 battalions, 30 aircraft squadrons, and 30 ships deployable within 30 days of alert. The NATO Secretary General had orchestrated a successful summit, if only the President of the United States would consent to accept. Yet he did not.

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An approach reliant on skirting the President would be especially dangerous in a foreign policy crisis where the President would need to take decisive action. It may provoke adversaries to test the murky area of commitment, and thus cause collapse in a crisis, leaving the weaker powers in an even worse circumstance. It may also fuel conspiracy theories on the far right in America about the so-called "deep state" circumventing the policy preferences of the elected leadership. But it has the potential to play on the US home court, to shape US societal and governmental attitudes that could percolate through to the President or to the many other power bases in the American system, such as media organisations, legislatures, businesses, and state governments with ethnic populations or historical ties to particular countries.

Backing away

Some of the countries most exposed to danger by Trump's policies are seeking to break free from American entanglements and carve out a separate peace with the threats they face. A close adviser to South Korea's Blue House has begun arguing that alliances in general are a "very unnatural state of international relations … [and] the best thing is to really get rid of alliance". Given that the best-case outcome for South Korea in the event of a preventative US strike on North Korea would be deaths in the tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands, Trump's recklessness gives strong incentives for South Korea to defect from the American order and embrace whatever separate peace it can make with North Korea, perhaps with China as guarantor to see that the North keeps its end of any bargain.

There are some indications that South Korea is already moving in this direction. The inter-Korean summit is the most notable example; another is South Korea brokering a North Korea-US summit with no preconditions (which already represents a compromise of US policy, but the Blue House rightly judged it would be too tempting for President Trump to resist). President Moon Jae-in is, in effect, baiting a reality television impresario with spectacle in return for loosening the bonds of an alliance that seems now to put South Korea at risk. It represents a substantial compromise of South Korea's longstanding policy and leaves it exposed to manipulation by both North Korea and China – which says an awful lot about the extent to which American "protection" has come to be seen by South Korea as a liability.

Kori Schake looks at the challenges of sustaining and promoting a liberal world order with an America led by populist President Donald Trump. Supplied

Those countries most protected from danger by their circumstances have also distanced themselves from the United States, becoming quiet but insistent voices advocating the values of the West. Chancellor Angela Merkel is the exemplar of this approach. She has kept a cool distance from President Trump, negotiating in private and avoiding policy disputes in public. Instead, she wears her physical discomfort with Trump visibly, and while largely avoiding criticism of him and his policies, speaks affirmatively of policies and attitudes at wide variance with those he practises.

Germany unquestionably wants to preserve the liberal order; what it does not want to do is defend it. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has said "a multilateral order based on agreed rules is and remains the best response to the challenges of our time". Advocacy for, and active participation in, international institutions has long been a staple of German foreign policy. But if that were adequate to the task at hand, Germany would not be faced with its present dilemma. As Ulrich Speck notes, in the crisis provoked by American abandonment of the liberal order, "Germany must venture out of its 'postmodern' comfort zone, while remaining globalist and liberal in character".

Concert of middle powers

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The most promising version of the "estrangement" approach is ad hoc co-operation by middle-power members of the liberal order to free themselves from US influence and marshal their strength to hold together the norms and institutions that shape the order. Rory Medcalf argues they already are: "Amid Sino-Russian disruption and American dysfunction, middle players such as France and Australia are stepping up as champions of a rules-based global order."

President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Like the British and French leaders, Abe has tried to cultivate a personal relationship with Trump in the hopes of tempering his policies. SUSAN WALSH

Medcalf probably overstates the case in saying that "France and Australia are two pillars of stability and liberal democratic values in a global system disrupted by populist nationalism, authoritarianism and coercive cross-border interference". Macron's victory was a close-run success, and liberalism cannot be said to have vanquished its foes in France while 34 per cent of French continue to support the National Front and Macron has not yet stared down striking workers.

Still, the concert idea has chalked up some successes, more than most of the unilateral approaches. For example, Canada, Japan and Australia have sustained the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement despite US withdrawal – so much so that President Trump publicly flirted with reconsidering America's participation. They, along with the European Union, are continuing their commitments to the Paris Climate Accords and mooting import taxes on US goods to recoup the costs of compliance. There is also ample opportunity for mobilising and imposing costs on the United States for the extravagance with which Washington now uses secondary sanctions against firms accessing the dollar zone.

Upholding – and enforcing – neutral rules on both the United States and China has the added advantage of disciplining America while countering the rise of an authoritarian China. This is clearly a priority for Asian members of the concert, but also for Europe. As former Norwegian foreign minister Espen Barth Eide often cautions, "China is not just rising for the United States, it is rising for Europe, too". And as Europeans are becoming increasingly aware, where China is concerned, their economic interests are to side with President Trump's efforts to bring China into compliance with the existing rules. A concert of middle powers would have the prospect of co-operating with the United States on economic rules and with China in cases where America affronts liberal sensibilities, as crazy an inversion as that may seem.

But nostalgia for what America once did, or once was, will complicate a concert further, especially if middle powers allied to the United States believe it might return to its former behaviour – it could prevent them really committing to co-operation that excludes the United States. It may also be that without American leadership, its closest allies cannot summon the will, the ambition, or the vision to continue prosperity-enhancing improvements. Gideon Rachman has lamented that:

French President Emmanuel Macron has not suffered any political backlash from his association with Trump. But liberalism cannot be said to have vanquished its foes in France while 34 per cent of voters continue to support the National Front. Christophe Petit Tesson

"… it is in the ability to gather like-minded countries for common purpose that the United States will be most missed as it ebbs away from international leadership. Who but the US will have the startling ambition to produce a trans-pacific trade partnership and the clout to deliver it? Who but the US so fully believes in liberalism's truths we hold to be self-evident that they would enact policies to democratise the Balkans or Iraq?"

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Defanging history

Beginning with Hegel, we in the West have considered it a fundamental element of philosophy that material prosperity would produce political moderation. That was the logic behind the Marshall Plan: despair produces political extremism, whereas material advancement attenuates sectarian and winner-takes-all politics. As Shakespeare cautions in Julius Caesar, people with a "lean and hungry look" are politically dangerous. Building a middle class is thus a constituent part of political stability. As a RAND study of the international order concluded, "the economic components of the order are the essential foundations on which all the other pieces rest".

In post-World War II Europe and Japan, that proved unquestionably true. People with the living memory of war and its deprivations revelled in turning their attention away from high-stakes politics. Not just in countries of the aggressors on whose territories the wars were fought, either: it is hard to understand the wilful innocence of American culture in the 1950s absent an appreciation that tens of millions of young men fought brutally in the war and yearned for placid lives as insurance actuaries and advertising men, wealthy enough that their wives could be homemakers, and the world safe enough for their children to consume cartoons and sports.

Since the end of the Cold War, that belief crystallised into an article of faith that attaining prosperity would produce more demanding political consumers. That participation in the institutions of the liberal order would liberalise illiberal countries. That the truths we hold to be self-evident are universal – a mother of six in the Pakistani Federally Administrated Tribal Areas, a 26-year-old Russian soldier, and an Iraqi Shiite Imam ministering to a congregation ravaged by a war brought by us all want the same freedoms and have the same political drivers that compel our own societies. Our policies have therefore been directed at expanding participation in the liberal order.

It is often alleged that America's policies are ahistorical, and that is unquestionably true. None with experience of the Balkans would believe its peoples could live together in peace without compulsion or sectarian subjugation. There is not an enormous literature about the longing of Muslim-majority countries for secular governance, nor are history books replete with examples of peaceful societal transformation. Most change comes by force of arms or in the wake of ruinous wars. But US foreign policy has at least as many victories due to a lack of historical counsel as it does failures. It is because of our belief in the universality of our political creed that we have advanced it on unfertile ground. If you had asked my grandfather to name countries incapable of living in peace, he would have said Germany and France.

And this is where the World War II analogy is so important: in making the case for the liberal order defanging history. The liberal order has created an alternative trajectory, one in which opting in to participation reduces the weight of history. Instead of being trapped by its history, a state could adopt the values and practices of the liberal order and be given better prospects for its prosperity and security.

Liberal order needs effort

The liberal order was not created by starry-eyed idealists in faculty lounges. It was hewed by the hard men who defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and dug the world out of starvation and rubble in the aftermath of war. They built it because they lived the wreckage of tens of millions of lives destroyed by an unregulated international system where threats gathered, strong states preyed on the weak, tariffs strangled trade, central bank policies exaggerated economic hardship, and aggression mounted until even strong states feared being overwhelmed. To the men and women who fought World Wars I and II, co-operation to manage nascent problems, compromise to avert conflict and encouraging patterns of behaviour that prejudiced further co-operation and compromise seemed like good outcomes cheaply purchased.

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The liberal order is not – has never been – self-sustaining. Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold projects an aura of inevitability about the success of Anglo-American values and endeavours. This radically understates the risk of failure to the liberal order slowly constructed over the 19th and 20th centuries. More recently Niall Ferguson extolled the "killer apps" of Western dominance as so deliciously exciting that authoritarian societies cannot keep pace. This, too, understates the challenge. As Azar Gat demonstrated, our theory of the case that Western liberalism provided the reasons for our success may dramatically underestimate the material advantages responsible for our dominance.

For the liberal order to be sustained, governments are going to have to move beyond narrow self-interest and educate their publics about the value of international norms, institutions and collective action to sustain a system that will not always deliver what the public wants. Perhaps Fukuyama may no longer believe the argument he made in The End of History and the Last Man. But I do. And not just that the liberal order is the natural zenith of human governance, but also that the ennui of those who already experience its benefits is as big a threat to the order as challenges from without.

The Chinese question

Reformers who speak mystically about the arc of justice bending towards history do themselves a disservice. The platitude may be of comfort in dark hours, but it is a message of passivity. The arc of history only bends towards justice when people of goodwill grab onto it and wrench it in the direction of justice. The liberal order will have to be fought for, compromised for, and rejuvenated. But I do believe it will be sustained. Because the values that undergird it genuinely are universal. People yearn for freedom – to have their rights acknowledged and protected in law. The trajectory Hegel outlined and which Fukuyama applies to the end of the Cold War is fundamental: as basic needs are met, people become more demanding political consumers. Perhaps China's leaders are wise enough to discern public attitudes without free media, virtuous enough to avoid corruption without accountability, shrewd enough to accurately gauge Western willingness to defend the order and act just shy of that threshold. But that's not the way to bet your money.

With China, the central question is whether the country can continue to prosper without liberalising. If so, the international system will likely have a new illiberal champion replacing the United States (much as the United States replaced Great Britain in the late 19th century). If not, it will have an authoritarian China with a stalling economy, something China's leaders believe is the greatest threat to their continued ability to govern the country.

A stalling, authoritarian China is surely the greatest threat to the liberal order without American leadership. China already challenges existing rules and uses military force and theft to extract economic advantage; these tendencies will be kicked into overdrive if the survival of the Chinese Communist Party is at stake. A concert of middle-strength liberal states would be hard-pressed to contain such a China. They could do so, but are unlikely to have confidence in their own strength, and thereby invite challenge or succumb to rationalising rather than responding to thinly sliced encroachments.

A China that grows stronger without liberalising will almost certainly become a threat to the liberal order. As will an America strong enough to pull down the temple of the liberal order on its own head. An America mired in a sense of stagnation probably will not; but it will nonetheless leave a void where order used to be, and lesser powers of equal venality to China, such as Russia, may move into the space.

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Out of their comfort zone

If China and America falter in navigating their respective political, economic and social challenges, a concert of middle powers could actually succeed for much longer than 10 to 15 years. In fact, that would be the ultimate success of the US-led order: American leadership becoming irrelevant to the functioning of the system, overtaken by middle powers' co-operative commitment to setting and enforcing rules against stronger powers that behave recklessly. As Daniel Deudney and John Ikenberry argue, "it is not inevitable that history will end with the triumph of liberalism, but it is inevitable that a decent world order will be liberal".

Still, it would require a much stronger international game than America's liberal allies are currently playing. At a minimum, it would require a strong and cohesive European Union, able to focus on external challenges. It would require those countries to be willing to run risks far beyond what they now do to shape and enforce order outside of Europe. It would require them to cajole countries with which they have uncomfortable histories – colonial or otherwise – into co-operation on the basis of values. It would require them to contain the United States, which could include compromising their access to the dollar zone, and allying with countries that share fewer of their values than would the United States. It would require stepping down off their pedestal of moral superiority and engaging the world as the United States has as the guarantor of the liberal order.

A RAND study of international order cautions, "if the economic and political ideas animating the order fragment, the order will not be far behind". Moreover, the authoritarian capitalist alternative to Western neoliberal ideas has already emerged and will not be easy to reverse. As Stefan Halper argues, emerging-market states "are learning to combine market economics with traditional autocratic or semi-autocratic politics in a process that signals an intellectual rejection of the Western economic model". We are unlikely to be saved from the malaise of our own making by rising powers' emulation.

Disorder and chaos

So disorder is likelier than spontaneous order. Wars will become more likely, although global conflagrations of the kind unleashed twice during the 20th century may not be the central concern, unless states band together in new alliances extending security guarantees that come to be questioned. Blocs that seek to shield weaker states from imposition by stronger powers could emerge without the United States or China. Then we are back to reading Thucydides, because his most interesting lessons are not about a trap by which rising powers inevitably war against an established hegemon, but about how weak states manipulate stronger ones into costly guarantees, how democracies persuade themselves to make foolish military expeditions and lose more than they realised they were wagering, the way insecurity foments the rise of demagogues in free societies, and the way celebrity intellectuals (in Thucydides' example, Socrates) encourage tyrants. The liberal order will have disintegrated.

What will replace it will not necessarily be a Hobbesian state of nature, but a more chaotic and less institutionalised order. It may feel like Europe after World War I, in which societies reeled from the changes of the new order, and co-operation was trumpeted but was not particularly meaningful after the United States refused to join in the common endeavour. Where the strong impose penurious but unenforceable peace on war's losing side. Where trade becomes a cudgel of statecraft rather than a lubricant of prosperity, and global supply chains flow back into national borders. Where resentment across national boundaries at others' prosperity generates plans to acquire it – as Shakespeare said in Henry V of England and France, "whose very shores look pale with envy of each other's happiness".

It will be an international order where the investments of the men who fought World War II and feared another such butcher's bill are squandered and very costly to regain. It will be an international order in which we look back with longing for the aggravations we now have in cultivating co-operation and managing competition among strong states.

Kori Schake is the deputy-director general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. She was previously a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

This is an edited extract from America vs the West: Can the liberal order be preserved by Kori Schake, a Lowy Institute Paper published by Penguin Random House Australia.